Los Angeles County launched a new emergency notification system Thursday. Alert LA County, similar to reverse 911 systems in some Southland cities, will automatically call residents and businesses in areas facing an emergency, such as a natural disaster or evacuation. The county already has a television and radio emergency notification system, but the new system is expected to be quicker and more targeted. It includes 7.

Has there ever been a political party so prone to adolescent crises of insecurity as the Democrats? After every dispiriting election, the Democrats turn themselves into a desperate high school suitor, begging a would-be prom date: "Tell me who you want me to be. I promise I'll change."

Voter.com, a popular political Web site that folded last month, is trying to raise cash by auctioning its consumer database, including the e-mail addresses, party affiliations and political interests of about 170,000 subscribers. The defunct Internet site is the latest to raise privacy hackles by peddling data about its users. A similar move last year by bankrupt Toysmart.com prompted a lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission.

Federal prosecutors said Tuesday that they had charged two men with stealing e-mail addresses and other information from about 120,000 Apple iPad tablet users. Daniel Spitler, 26, of San Francisco and Andrew Auernheimer, 25, of Fayetteville, Ark., each were accused last week of conspiring to hack into AT&T Inc.'s servers and possessing subscriber data from those servers, according to the U.S. attorney's office in New Jersey, where the case is being prosecuted. Prosecutors said the criminal charges stem from a "brute force" hacking spree that took place over several days last June.

As Evander Holyfield flipped through the pages of a children's book with his daughter in the back of a stretch limo, en route to an appointment with a documentary film maker in Hollywood, the people traveling with the heavyweight champion were earning their pay in crisis management. Did Jack Nicholson, as rumored, have flu, they asked via their cell phones. If so, did he still plan to attend Friday night's Laker game against Seattle?

Sheriff Joe Arpaio turned off one of his "jail cams" that showed female inmates using a toilet, a view that could be accessed via the Internet. The decision followed complaints from inmate rights groups and the state attorney general. Donna Hamm, director of Middle Ground, an inmate-rights group in Tempe, said Thursday that the camera exploited the women and was linked to pornographic sites on the Internet. She asked the Justice Department to investigate for civil rights violations.

FOOTBALL URBAN LEGEND : Did a Gatorade shower lead to the death of a Hall of Fame football coach? After leading the New York Giants to a victory in Super Bowl XLVI earlier this year, head coach Tom Coughlin earned himself his second post-Super Bowl Gatorade shower (in the Giants' Super Bowl XLII victory, it appeared to be water/melted ice while this time around it was purple Gatorade). While the Gatorade shower is a notable tradition for coaches who just won the big game (a tradition popularized by the New York Giants during the 1980s, although not one invented by the Giants, as I established in a Football Urban Legends Revealed here )

BASEBALL URBAN LEGEND : A Penn State baseball player came up with the "Nittany Lion" mascot at a baseball game as a response to taunts from fans of another team. As I have detailed in a number of legends over the years (like this tale of the Georgetown mascot that was a war hero), college fans and players have always taken a great deal of pride from their school mascots. What do you do, then, when your school does not have a mascot? That was the situation that a Penn State baseball player found himself in in 1904 when he managed to invent the Nittany Lion out of whole cloth as an answer to taunts from Princeton baseball supporters.

SOCCER/FOOTBALL URBAN LEGEND : Pele was paid to tie his shoelaces in the 1970 World Cup Final. Nowadays, the idea of athletes endorsing sneakers is well ingrained in the public consciousness. Seemingly every draft class in the NBA has at least one player sign an endorsement deal with one of the major sneaker companies in the United States (for instance, Anthony Davis, the first pick of the 2012 NBA Draft, has already signed with Nike). However, in the early days of the so-called "sneaker wars" between rival shoe companies Adidas and Puma, athlete endorsements were seen as a much bigger risk.